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An alternative vision of politics and violence: Introducing mimetic
theory in international studies
Brighi, E. and Cerella, A.
This is a copy of the accepted author manuscript of the following article: Brighi, E. and
Cerella, A. (2015) An alternative vision of politics and violence: Introducing mimetic
theory in international studies. Journal of International Political Theory, 11 (1), pp. 3-25.
The final definitive version is available from the publisher Sage at:
https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1755088214555455
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1
An Alternative Vision of Politics and Violence:
Introducing Mimetic Theory in International Studies
Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.
Benjamin ([1933] 1991: 210)
Introduction
In the first of a long series of well-known university lectures, Heidegger (1968: 7)
states: “that which really gives us food for thought did not turn way from man at
some time or other which can be fixed in history – no, what really must be thought
keeps itself turned away from man since the beginning.” One might suppose that
René Girard has closely interpreted this Heiddegerian suggestion. For his work goes
backwards in the attempt, revolutionary and radical, to search for precisely those
things hidden since the foundation of the world.1 The origin of this new Archimedean
point is traced back, as the reader will see, to a human dimension that has long been
familiar but forgotten, close and seemingly distant, so near as to be hidden: imitation.
“There is nothing” – Girard (1987: 7) affirms – “in human behaviour that is not
learned, and all learning is based on imitation. If human beings suddenly ceased
imitating, all forms of culture would vanish.” This seemingly simple statement, as we
shall see, will find in Girard’s thought a new theoretical and revolutionary statute.
During a decades-long career,2 Girard has developed this initial intuition to
build a general theory on the role of culture, religion and violence among the most
original and radical of the last century. His work has been studied and fruitfully
applied in the most diverse disciplines3 and is not a coincidence that the philosopher
Gianni Vattimo has recently declared: ‘Reading René Girard’s work was as decisive
1 This is not by chance the title of Girard’s magnum opus (1987).2 For a detailed account of René Girard’s life and work, see Palaver (2013: 1-14).3 For an overview of Girardian Studies, see the website of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion: http://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/
2
to me as it was to read some of the works of Heidegger […] not just in intellectual
terms but existential and personal ones too’ (Antonello, 2010: 27).
The aim of this introduction is twofold: to explore the fundamental concepts that
form the basis of Girard’s mimetic theory and to explain its analytic potential for
international studies. To do this, the first part of the introduction will locate the work
of Girard within the corpus of Western philosophical tradition by understanding, first,
its epistemological originality and, accordingly, the hermeneutic insights that it offers
to the humanities and social sciences. Girard, in fact, is a thinker who should be read
by difference rather than similarity or analogy. Although he remains very close to
many of the concepts and ideas of the Western tradition, Girard distances himself
from them in a ‘subtle’ way and, for this reason, the originality of his work is
sometimes not fully understood. In reconstructing Girard’s thought, it seems
appropriate to follow the path that he himself, in a recent interview (Williams, 2003:
262), suggested to be the evolution of his work and experience, characterized by
“three great moments”: first, the discovery of the relationship between mimetic desire
and rivalry; second, the scapegoat mechanism; finally, the uniqueness of the Bible
from the standpoint of the scapegoat theory.
The Epistemological Foundations: Imitation, Desire and Autonomy
Girard’s work is based on a fundamental and “single intuition”: the problematic
relation that exists between mimetic behaviour and conflict (Girard, 1994: 190). This
perspective has been underestimated in the social sciences and humanities because
imitation, for a very long time, has been considered “a low-level, cognitively
undemanding, even childish form of behaviour” (Hurley and Chater, 2005: 1).
However, in the last two decades, a growing body of work has stressed the
importance of imitation in processes of human development, social identification and
cultural transmission. The discovery of mirror neurons, the recent advances in brain
imaging and findings in social psychology all testify to the centrality of imitation in the
human and social condition (Gallese et al., 1996; Meltzoff, 2007). As Hurley and
Chater (2005: 1) have pointed out “imitation is not just an important factor in human
development, it also has a pervasive influence throughout adulthood in ways we are
just starting to understand”.
To understand, then, why this fundamental human dimension has been for a
very long time downplayed within the human and social sciences, it is necessary to
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penetrate the originary reason behind this neglect, investigating what has been
called the paradigm of reflection or Representationalism (Sandwell, 1995: 42-51).
For, behind the oblivion of the mimetic faculty lies a worldview that has opposed, in a
symmetric fashion, the mimetic conception, by establishing an ontology and
epistemology based on the concepts of originality and autonomy of reason. This
paradigm can be traced back up to Plato.
In the Book X of the Republic (2003: 317, emphasis added), Plato depicts the
famous dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon on the theme of true art. In it,
discussing the role of imitation in painting, he writes: “‘what is the object of painting?
Does it aim to imitate what is, as it is? Or imitate what appears, as it appears? Is it
imitation of appearance or of truth?’ ‘Of appearance,’ he said. ‘In that case, I would
imagine, the art of imitation is a far cry from truth. The reason it can make
everything, apparently, is that it grasps just a little of each thing – and only an image
at that”. The dialogue rests on the Platonic doctrine of truth and on the well-known
separation between the ‘real world’ of the Forms and the ephemeral one of images,
of their copies or imitations. This is why Socrates can then conclude that “painting –
and imitation in general – operates in an area of its own, far removed from the truth,
and that it associates with the element in us which is far removed from intelligence –
a liaison and friendship from which nothing healthy or true can result.” (Plato, 2003:
324, emphasis added)
According to Girard (1987: 8), this understanding of mimesis would have set a
negative ontology of imitation that has dominated the history of Western thought, so
preventing the exploration of the relationship between imitation and conflict which, as
we shall see, is central in the work of the French scholar. This primeval fracture
between Idea and reality would have resulted in a reductionist vision of imitation,
limiting it to either mere copying (facial, linguistic, and behavioral) or simple
representation (imitation of Form or eidos). In effect, even Aristotle (1898: 15),
although recognizing that “the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from
childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most
imitative of living creatures”, seems to denote the concept of mimesis as a mere
representation of reality. Discussing art, and echoing Plato, he writes in his Poetics
(1898: 7): “Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the
music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general
conception modes of imitation”. Here, once again, mimesis means re-ad-
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praesentare, i.e. make present again something by means of the arts. Yet, in
Aristotle’s work one can find a fundamental difference with Plato’s. The artist, in fact,
imitating does not simply copy reality but somehow he has the ability to intensify it, to
make it ‘unique’: “while reproducing the distinctive form of the original” she makes “a
likeness which is true to life and yet more beautiful.” (Aristotle, 1898: 57) For Aristotle
(1898: 35), in other words, imitation is not limited to reproduce the real since the fine
arts, such as poetry, are able to glean and to express the universal. This dialectical
relationship between imitation and creativity, real and universal, will dominate the
discourse on imitation from antiquity until the Renaissance (Garrels, 2011: 7).
However, it is worth noting that this conception has effectively relegated the
relation between imitation and life to the spheres of the arts and of individuality,
without ever fully apply these insights into the interpersonal, social and political
domains. Even more important is the fact that imitation has always been conceived
as sublimation of reality, abstracting representation and not as an actual modality of
life; reflection on – and pursuit of – stylistic perfection and not analysis of social
dynamics. In other words, this paradigm of reflection whether understood “as an
experience, method, or philosophical attitude—desires an order of necessary truths
immune from semiotic, figural, social, and cultural mediation.” (Sandwell, 1995: 42)
Based on these assumptions, modern thought has partly built the so-called
‘Enlightenment project’. The paradigm of reflection is, in fact, only one of the two
faces of Representationalism. It will find its full development in the modern age,
when this vision will encounter the new ‘postulate of autonomy’, thus inflicting
another blow to the mimetic conception of the social world. In this regard, Girard
(2012: 91-95) believes that Western individualism and the “romantic illusion” of the
autonomy of humanity has its roots in the Cartesian ego cogito. With its separation
between perception/emotion and thought/behaviour, it would have promoted “the
emanation of a serene subjectivity, the creation ex nihilo of a quasi-divine ego.”
(Girard, 1966: 15) Girard’s critique, in this sense, converges with that of Heidegger
(2003: 129, emphasis added) who had precisely attributed to Descartes the invention
of “the idea of the essence of man” by means of which the ‘human being’ “is
everywhere and at all times determinable and, that means, representable.” The
construction of this solipsistic subjectivism, and of an intrinsically self-contained
being that does not need interpersonal relationships to form her own substantia,
would have transformed the modern individual into the sole source “of the giving-of-
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meaning […] establishing the essence of man as its authoritative subject.”
(Heidegger, 2003: 129)
It is not difficult then to see why the mimetic dimension has been obscured within
the Western philosophical discourse. Under the blows of the paradigm of
representation first, and ‘the myth of autonomy’ later, the idea of “a purely
autonomous and rational self” was established with the resources “to determine the
object of his desire without support of other(s) or imitation.” (Garrels, 2011: 8-9) This
conception has come down to Kant who, in his Critique of Practical Reason (2002:
48), forcefully states that “Autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws
and of the duties conforming to them”. However, even if this ‘theorem’ connects
directly the rational subject with the categorical imperative and the access to morality
with the autonomy of the individual, Kant is fully aware that freedom and autonomy,
as pure concepts, represent only the “formal conditions of the possibility of a law.”
“Therefore the moral law expresses nothing other than the autonomy of pure
practical reason, i.e., freedom; and this [autonomy] is itself the formal condition of all
maxims, under which alone they can harmonize with the supreme practical
law.”(Kant, 2002: 49, emphasis added) Kant (2002: 49), in short, provides a clear
separation between formal (or normative) and substantive (non-normative) autonomy
of the individual, between the foundation of a pure moral law (and the access to it)
and “any matter of practical rules” which rests “always on subjective conditions” and
cannot be universal. Unfortunately, this crucial distinction over time has faded, so
confusing the two levels of analysis. Representation and autonomy, rationality and
free will, thus went to form that “dialectic of Enlightenment" that has marked the
history of Western modernity, by ignoring the actual and substantial impact that
imitation plays in the processes of interpersonal and social formation (O’Shea, 2012:
3).4
Mimetic Desire, Acquisitive Mimesis and Rivalry
4 The only partial yet notable exceptions are the works on imitation of Gabriel Tarde (1903) and William James (1950).
6
As we have tried to show, under the pressure of subjectivist and autonomist
paradigms imitation has been largely marginalized in the study of social and political
phenomena.
Since his first book, Girard (1966: 28-9) has proposed a radical rethinking of the
individualist ontology, criticizing “the illusion of spontaneous desire and of a
subjectivity almost divine in its autonomy.” In effect, Girard believes that humans are
essentially mimetic animals, endowed with an extreme openness to the Other, a
natural inclination toward interpersonal relationships. This does not mean that
human beings are a sort of automata at the mercy of social relations but rather that
they have the peculiar ability to form their own subjectivity only in conjunction with
others. Autonomy, in other words, would not be achieved by means of a
‘parthenogenesis of imagination’, as suggested by the Enlightenment and Romantic
writers, but only through complex mimetic inter-relationships. Here, however, it is
important to specify the first conceptual originality of mimetic theory. Humans, in fact,
would not be driven by a tendency to imitation per se, but specifically to imitate the
desires of others. According to Girard, man is an animal that desires but does not
know what to desire. For this reason he borrows his desires from others. As Girard
put it:
Humankind is that creature who lost a part of its animal instinct in order to gain access
to ‘desire’, as it is called. Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire
intensely, but they don’t know exactly what they desire, for no instinct guides them. We
do not each have our desire, one really our own. The essence of desire is to have no
essential goal. Truly to desire we must have recourse to people about us; we have to
borrow their desires.
[…] If our desires were not mimetic, they would be forever fixed on predetermined
objects; they would be a particular form of instinct. Human beings could no more
change their desire than cows their appetite for grass. Without mimetic desire there
would be neither freedom nor humanity. (Girard, 2001: 15)
Mimetic desire is, in short, the uniquely human characteristic that distinguishes
us from other animals. It is the essential factor of social life and yet it is non-
deterministic (because it leaves open the freedom to choose what to imitate) and
non-instinctual (desire is not an urge, drive, or simply a passion). If it is true then that
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the human being is a homo desiderans, and that her desires are not an instinct
satisfiable by itself but require a direction, a model, to be formed, this means that the
nature of desires is not subjective or objective but always mediated by the Other:
“[w]e assume that desire is objective or subjective, but in reality it rests on a third
party who gives value to the objects. The third party is usually the one who is
closest, the neighbour.” (Girard, 2001: 9) In short, desires are always mediated by a
model (usually the nearest to us and the most accessible, as in the children-parents
relationships).
Yet this mediation does not take place in an abstract vacuum but rather in the
concrete and actual reality. For the form that mimetic desire assumes in the
mediation is that of an object (a toy, a lover, political power, territory, etc.). This
makes the relation between desire and imitation problematic because we tend to
desire the objects desired by our model-mediator, thus creating a potential conflict:
“If individuals tend to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their
neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of
human relations.” (Girard, 2001: 8) Accordingly, therefore, if desire generates
imitation and imitation, in turn, evokes desires, this dialectical relation has a
tendency toward acquisition and appropriation, i.e. to transform imitation in
competition and rivalry. There is, in fact, a close connection between desire and
what he calls acquisitive mimesis:
If the appropriative gesture of an individual named A is rooted in the imitation of an
individual named B, it means that A and B must reach together for one and the same
object. They become rivals for that object. If the tendency to imitate appropriation is
present on both sides, imitative rivalry must tend to become reciprocal; it must be
subject to the back and forth reinforcement that communication theorists call a positive
feedback. In other words, the individual who first acts as a model will experience an
increase in his own appropriative urge [i.e. desire] when he finds himself thwarted by
his imitator and the model of his own model. (Girard, 2003: 9)
This analysis seems to echo Hobbes’ insights in his Leviathan (1998: 66). It is well-
known that the English philosopher attributes precisely to man’s passions, and to his
“perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death”, the
propensity to generate conflict, rivalry and, ultimately, violence. It is man’s ceaseless
8
desire – combined with his tendency to competition, diffidence and glory – that leads
him to conflict, so that “if any two men desire the same equality thing, which
nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their
end, (which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation
only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another.” (Hobbes, 1998: 83, emphasis
added) However, there are crucial differences between Girard’s ideas and those of
the English philosopher. Hobbes’ thought, in fact, rests on a utilitarian perspective
(scarcity of resources creates conflict) and a negative anthropology (natural
inclination of man to evil), while Girard (1994: 27; 2004: 10) denies that conflict is
determined by the scarcity of resources or simply by man’s ‘deviated nature’. For
Girard, far from being (only) trigged by scarcity or by man’s natural aggressiveness,
rivalry is the outcome of an imitative process (Girard, 1994: 27).5
To understand the differences between mimetic theory and Hobbes’
conceptualizations, it is worth analysing what Girard calls the triangular structure of
mimetic desire (see figure 1).
{Enter figure 1 about here}
{Enter figure 2 about here}
As we have seen, this ‘structure’ takes the form of a triptych, i.e. it connects the Self,
the Other as mediator/model and the object that the subject/self desires because she
believes the mediator desires it. It is important to point out that this “triangle is no
Gestalt. The real structures are intersubjective. They cannot be localized anywhere;
the triangle has no reality whatever […] because changes in size and shape do not
destroy the identity of this figure.” (Girard, 1966: 2, emphasis added) This means
that the mimetic relations that are established between the subject and the model
are pre-cognitive and pre-rational, or even if they involve the actors in an active
manner they are not really conscious and intelligible. Accordingly, the logic driving
the conflictual escalation between individuals taken in the mimetic rivalry is hidden
5 With his approach, Girard also distances himself from Hegel and his theory of ‘desire for recognition’ (Kojève, 1980: 7). While for Hegel the power of desire rests on wanting to get recognition through the desire of others, even at the cost of life, for Girard rivalry rests on the ambivalent desire to possess what the Other/model possesses. In Girard, this is not a self-conscious process. On the contrary, it is only a subconscious and interpersonal dynamics; indeed a mimetic one.
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from the actors themselves and yet escalating precisely because it cannot be
completely rationalized:
The appearance of a rival seems to validate the desire, the immense value of the object
desired. Imitation becomes intensified at the heart of the hostility, but the rivals do all they
can to conceal from each other and from themselves the cause of the intensification.
Unfortunately, concealment doesn’t work. In imitating my rival desires I give him the
impression that he has good reasons to desire what he desires, to possess what he
possesses, and so the intensity of his desire keeps increasing […] The paradox is that the
resistance itself brings about the re-enactment. (Girard, 2001: 10, 20)
The origin of the rivalry, then, lies in this double exchange for which the
individuals involved are part of a double mediation: everyone becomes a model/rival
of the other increasing mimetic desire and conflict: “[e]ach becomes the imitator of
his own imitator and the model of his own model. Each tries to push aside the
obstacle that the other places in his path” (Girard, 2004: 9) (see figure 2). A vicious
circle is then created by this struggle between doubles which, in some cases,
transforms the initial rivalry in actual violence. Following Girard, violence is not the
result of a desire for self-affirmation (as for Hegel) or to possess a not divisible object
(as in Hobbes), but of the interpersonal and mimetic nature of desire and rivalry that
tend to escalate to extremes: “violence is generated by this process; or rather
violence is the process itself when two or more partners try to prevent one another
from appropriating the object they all desire through physical or other means”.
(Girard, 2004: 9, emphasis added) In short, there would be no first cause – an archè
of violence – through which to trace back the origins of hostility since violence is
generated and not original. The reciprocity of mimetic rivalry is the nucleus of
conflict. It is precisely for this reason that it has a tendency to intensify because
desire, as it were, “is responsible for its own evolution.” (Girard, 1987: 304)
This would also explain the tendency of violence to escalate in size and
numbers, that is toward what Girard (2001: 22) defines snowballing or violent
contagion. Once spread in a group or community, thanks to the mimetic nature of
rivalry, violence may become contagious, triggering a kind of chain reactions through
which this mimetic interplay transforms antagonists into a “mass of interchangeable
beings. In this homogeneous mass the mimetic impulses no longer encounter any
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obstacle and spread at high speed”. (Girard, 2001: 22) The logic of revenge and
vendetta closely resemble this violent reciprocal interaction. However, if violence is
characterized by this tendency to escalate (among individuals as well as groups and
political community), how is it possible to establish peaceful forms of coexistence?
And what is the role of institutions and culture in determining conflict as well as
pacification? Is it possible to interpose something to the mimetic contagion that, as
we have seen, represents the central problem of rivalry? To answer these questions
it is necessary to explore the second part of Girard’s theoretical apparatus.
Violence, Culture and Religion: The Missing Link
Mimetic theory is not only an attempt to conceptualize the role of violence in human
relations, but also – and above all – an approach capable of linking violence with the
origin of culture, its symbolic forms, and religion.
Following Girard, we have seen that the possibility of escalation is inherent in
violence and rivalry, precisely because of their mimetic character. This tendency to
extremes is the result of a profoundly human characteristic, i.e. mimetic desire.
Accordingly, this means that the propensity to violent escalation is a specifically
human feature because it rests on his peculiar mimicry of desires. But is it really so?
Numerous ethological researches seem to corroborate this view (Palaver, 2013: 122-
4; de Waal, 1996: 71-73). Even in the animal kingdom in general, and among the
anthropomorphic monkeys in particular, imitation and competition play an important
role in triggering conflict but with one major difference: “human beings enter into
rivalry for highly symbolized objects and that the very existence of these rivalries is
made possible by symbolic institutions.” (Girard, 1987: 93) In other words, while in
the animal kingdom violence and conflict are held in check by dominance patterns,
i.e. well-defined pre-symbolic and pre-linguistic hierarchical systems, humans have
the unique ability to create symbolic institutions to canalize “desire in divergent
directions and making acquisitive mimesis impossible.” (Girard, 1987: 91)
In order to explain this difference, which is crucial, Girard does not postulate an
ontological difference between humans and animals but, from an evolutionary
perspective, he retraces the genealogy of imitation to establish a point of
differentiation. Through this ‘archaeology of man’, captured in its transition from the
animal kingdom, Girard believes that it was precisely the increased propensity for
imitation to have triggered the process of hominization. There must have been a time
11
when “the intensification of mimetic rivalry, which is already very much in evidence at
the level of primates, destroyed dominance patterns and gave rise to progressively
more elaborated and humanised forms of culture.” (Girard, 1987: 94) This
phylogenetic moment is defined by Girard the founding murder. At a time when
mimetic rivalry reaches a high level of intensity, it would trigger a mimetic crisis, a
chain reaction of violence, much like the war of all against all described by Hobbes. It
would be at that point that the crowd – experiencing an undifferentiated violence,
once that all the ‘natural’ mechanisms which used to contain violence are broken – in
the choice between the mutual and complete self-destruction and survival, would
canalize violence towards a surrogate victim or scapegoat: “The community affirms
its unity in the sacrifice, a unity that emerges from the moment when division is most
intense, when the community enacts its dissolution in the mimetic crisis and its
abandonment to the endless cycle of vengeance. But suddenly the opposition of
everyone against everyone else is replaced by the opposition of all against one.”
(Girard, 1987: 24) This scapegoat mechanism would create, for the very first time, a
symbolic signifier through which the new community, becoming aware of the
difference between a before and an after, an inside and an outside, peace and
violence, would create a protoform culture. This primeval symbolic differentiation
would rest right on the mechanism of scapegoating. For, the surrogate victim is
sacrificed because she is considered responsible for the disorder and, at the same
time, her killing restores an order of meaning. She would be, then, the subject of a
double transference: she would literally be sacrificed, which means killed and made
sacred, an object of contempt (as cause of the disorder) as well as veneration (for
the re-establishment of order). This dual nature of the sacred would explain the
contradictory meaning of this term that has been recorded by many anthropologists
and by Durkheim (2008: 306) who has described the “ambiguous nature”, the
tendency to “transmute” – to stand in the balance between purity and impurity – of
this concept. Culture and religion, then, would be born out of murder. For this
reason, Girard (2010: 21), from his anthropological perspective, states that original
sin is vengeance – “never-ending vengeance” - because only this process could
trigger the cycle of violence that has led to the first mimetic crisis and, therefore, to
the actualization of the scapegoat mechanism.
This hypothesis on the origin of culture, and on the relation between violence
and religion, is somewhat controversial because of its meta-historical character. The
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founding murder is in fact an episode (or series of incidents or crises) that happened
in illo tempore, and cannot be empirically analysed. Yet, according to Girard, there
would be traces and significant evidence of this historical moment. The founding
murder would constitute a sort of anthropogenic Big Bang and, just like the
primordial explosion, it would have left traces and cultural remnants in myths, rituals
and prohibitions. In one of his best known book, Violence and the Sacred (1977),
Girard explores in depth the structure of myths, especially the myths of origin, to
reveal how they “always begin by recounting a crisis in human relations, which often
takes the guise of an ‘affliction’ or ‘plague’.” (Antonello, 2010: 24). Usually, in the
mythical narrative, these are resolved “through a dramatic alteration in the mimetic
unanimity: the violence of the community… all devolves into a single victim…
chosen for arbitrary reasons.” In other words, the structure of myths would replicate
that of the sacred, “the foundational act of which is the lynching or the expulsion, real
at first, and later symbolic, of an innocent victim.” (Antonello, 2010: 24, emphasis
added) But there is more. Through this archaeology of the arcane, Girard (1987: 21)
is able to show how “all prohibitions and rituals can be related to mimetic conflict.”
For prohibitions in archaic societies would have the aim to prevent the potentially
conflictual imitation (think of the Decalogue: Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not
commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet, etc.), while rituals
“should be an attempt to reproduce, often in frighteningly realistic manner, precisely
what societies fear the most”, i.e. violent escalation. In short, rituals would have a
cathartic purpose (to symbolically re-enact sacrifices to avoid violent escalation)
while prohibitions a preventive one (to forbid violent acts and conflictual behaviour).
In this way it is possible to understand why for Girard there is an indissoluble link
between violence and (archaic) religion, not because they contain a violent
ideologeme (as is often assumed) but because, born out of primordial violence, they
are always exposed to the ‘marks of the sacred’, its structure, prohibitions and
purifying rituals. For this reason, Girard (1987: 32) can finally state that: “Religion is
nothing other than this immense effort to keep the peace. The sacred is violence, but
if religious man worships violence it is only insofar as the worship of violence is
supposed to bring peace; religion is entirely concerned with peace, but the means it
has of bringing it about are never free of sacrificial violence.”
The Event of Crucifixion: History, Secularization and Eschatology
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Girard has devoted the last phase of his career to biblical exegesis and to the study
of the differences between archaic religions and those of the Book, so elaborating
what is considered the most controversial aspect of his analysis. Drawing on an
unpublished work of Nietzsche, defined by Girard the “single greatest theological text
of the nineteenth century” (Palaver 2013: 197), he has discovered that there is a
radical antithesis between archaic religions and Christianity. In fact, both the mythical
and the Biblical narratives present a strong ‘sacrificial structure’, that is accounts of
violence and sacrifices. Yet, according to Girard, while the mythic narrative
‘conceals’ the sacrificial mechanism in its account, which is always told from the
perspective of the perpetrators, Christianity would have reversed this narrative,
putting the victim at the centre of the discourse on violence. The analogy between
ancient religions and Christianity (which had been extensively studied by James G.
Frazer), then, would only be structural, not substantive. With Christianity, what the
myth tells in the form of a purgatory and expiatory self-justification (sacrifice as
necessary), is brought to the consciousness of its uselessness and injustice. As
Girard put it:
In myth, the standpoint is always that of the violent community that discharges its violence onto a victim it sees as guilty and whom it expels as a means of reestablishment the social order. In the mythic account the victim is always guilty, and is represented as such. Think of Oedipus, who commits parricide and incest and for that is expelled from the city […] Christianity reverses this situation, demonstrating that the victim is not guilty and that the unanimous crowd knows not what it does when it unjustly accuses this victim. […] With the gospel and the Passion of Jesus, this anthropological truth about humanity is revealed, put on display in its entirety: we, in our history as cultural animals, have always sought scapegoats in order to resolve our crisis, and we have killed and then divinized them without knowing what we were doing. (Antonello, 2010: 24-26)
The crucifixion, then, would represent the Event-advent of modernity. It is only
thanks to the unveiling of the mimetic mechanism brought about by the Christian
message that humanity could escape the ‘sacrificial loop’, so starting a progressive
and non-cyclic historical path (i.e., not linked to the sacrificial cycle). Modernity,
therefore, should be understood, literally as overcoming of a modus, a limit, i.e. the
scapegoat mechanism. This new awareness, for Girard, would act as a destructive
principle that brings with itself both the emergence of a new ethic and, at the same
time, the seeds of its own (self)dissolution. This means that the Christian ethic, with
14
its emphasis on freedom and free will, would lead to a process of demystification and
desacralization because “secularization also entails the end of the sacrificial.” There
is, in fact, “a temporality of the sacrificial, and violence is subject to erosion and
entropy […] When, thanks to Christianity, we get rid of the sacred, there is a salvific
opening up to agape, to charity, but there is also an opening up to perhaps greater
violence.” (Antonello, 2010: 32) Here Girard’s analysis crosses once again that of
some of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. His idea of modernity as
liberation and secularization, both triggered by the Christian message, echoes the
analysis of Charles Taylor and Ivan Illich. The latter had precisely defined modernity
as a corruptio optimi pessima, i.e. as a secularization of the Christian message
deprived of its transcendent force. In the reading given by Taylor (in Illich, 2005: xi):
The secularization of Western culture and, indeed, widespread disbelief in God have arisen
in close symbiosis with this belief in a moral order of rights-bearing individuals who are
destined (by God or Nature) to act for mutual benefit. Such an order thus rejects the earlier
honour ethic which exalted the warrior, just as the new order also tends to occlude any
transcendent horizon […] This understanding of order has profoundly shaped the modern
West’s dominant forms of imaginary: the market economy, the public sphere, the sovereign
‘people.’
The theological structure of Christianity would have been eroded from within,
immanentized, emptied of its original ethical message (i.e., the persona replaced
with the individual, the Christian ethos with fragmented ethics, the imitatio Christi
with the models imposed by the new society of the spectacle, authority with the mere
legality, etc.). In this way, one can understand why, according to Girard, the
contemporary age of globalization rests, literally, on an apocalyptic trend
(understood as unveiling and revealing). The release produced by Christianity has
left us without ‘safeguards’ of the sacred, liberating us but, at the same time,
unleashing a potential unlimited mimetic conflict. In the contemporary age, where all
distinctions, barriers and classic mediations seem to weaken and collapse, there is
room for a planetary crisis of undifferentiation. If, on the one hand, globalization has
created a huge potential for interpersonal relations and exchange, on the other hand
it has left open an abysmal ethical gap, failing to develop an ethical model
appropriate to its age of extreme mobility. In a world that rests on neo-liberal
15
postulates, on the logic of the market and the models imposed by it, and in which the
power of the new technology is not capable of producing new ethical principles, “the
whole planet now finds itself, with regard to violence, in a situation comparable to
that of the most primitive groups of human beings, except that this time we are fully
aware of it.” (Girard, 1987: 260-1) In this final stage, Girard’s analysis, crossing that
of some reactionary thinkers such as Schmitt and Heidegger, sends us a message of
ambiguous pessimism: the problem of man in the age of the world picture cannot
simply be solved by idolatrizing or demonizing technology but rather trying to
develop a thought capable of thinking its problematicity, an ethics adequate to the
new mobile condition of the homo technologicus.
Mimetic Theory and the ‘International’: Implications, Issues and Themes
What are the implications of Girard’s insights for international studies? What is the
picture of the ‘international’ that opens before us when we approach the world from
the vantage point of mimesis? Building on the first half of the paper, this section
outlines the analytical opportunities and substantive challenges that arise from
rethinking the subject and theoretical field of international studies mimetically. The
argument put forward here is that Girard’s insights into the political, the role of
violence and the place of the sacred provide a set of promising and powerful starting
points for theorising ‘the international’ that are alternative to the International
Relations (IR) canon. Firstly, they have the potential to radically destabilize the
understandings put forward by classic and contemporary theories of IR, starting from
the long-dominant realist tradition and its liberal alter-ego, concerning key
foundational notions such as international order and anarchy. Secondly, they raise
important questions and point to some critical inadequacies in how we theorise the
social, sacred and global plane on which the edifice of international politics is
purportedly built. Thirdly and lastly, they are able to read the central problematique of
international relations – the problem of war and, by extension, security – through
markedly different analytical lenses. In the process of engaging with mimetic theory,
international studies emerges as a new subject, freed from the conventional
hierarchies in which IR theory has confined it, yet also pointedly different from the
picture painted by other critical accounts of IR and ultimately, genuinely and
organically linked to the broader field of human and social experience.
16
That no engagement with the writings of René Girard has yet taken place in
IR, with only a few notable exceptions (Thomas, 2005; Juergensmeyer 1991, 2008;
Cambridge Review of International Affairs 2013), is a testament to the oft-lamented
intellectual narrowness of the field. It would be tempting at this stage to fill this
notable gap by doing what IR has accustomed itself with (Brown, 2013) – namely,
appropriating a new thinker, normalise his work for an IR audience, and announce
the start of the ‘mimetic turn’ in IR. The aim of this Special Issue and of this
introduction, however, is different. The attempt here is not to muster up a new
orthodoxy. Rather, it is to paint and contemplate the new picture of the ‘international’
that emerges once a change of perspective is introduced – a perspective that unveils
a powerfully different point of origin and projects us towards an unsettling vanishing
point.
Of origins, ontology and teleology: mimetic challenges to IR theory
Despite the strong assonance in themes, Girard’s writings have not directly engaged
with the subject matter of international relations, as academically defined, let alone
with its theories. Bringing mimetic theory to bear on IR Theory is therefore an
invigorating yet not entirely straightforward exercise, given the frequent slippage in
conceptual categories, vocabulary and quite naturally methods. However, it is
precisely in this slippage, tension and sudden reversals of perspective that one finds
precious material for reflection.
The first and most fundamental of such reversals concerns the relation
between politics, order and violence. The primacy of politics is the first IR canon that
gets dispelled in light of Girard’s insights into the origins of the political – a set of
insights that Benoît Chantre effectively summarised in the formula, ‘politics is part of
violence, not violence part of politics’ (Girard 2012: 109). In Girard, violence is not
the recessive, weak element in the binary relation with politics, but the dominant,
prevailing one. Violence is the scarlet secret presiding over the construction of
political order and, as such, it is violence that has a primacy over politics, not the
other way around. This clearly poses a challenge first and foremost to those liberal
approaches to international relations (eg., Ikenberry 2011; Slaughter 2005) whose
formal understanding of order remains optimistically blind to power imbalances,
patterns of colonial and neo-colonial domination as well the sheer human costs of
maintaining the international system and its power structure. In Girardian terms,
17
liberalism fails to acknowledge the permanently violent, necessarily sacrificial basis
of political order.
Throughout his writings, Girard stigmatises and critiques harshly that
Enlightenment rationalism which still propels contemporary liberal approaches to IR
by, on the one hand, debunking the illusion of an authentic, autonomous and rational
‘self’ (on which see above and more later) and by ridiculing the acritical attachment
to Reason that the liberal project subscribes to – be it in the pursuit of its human
rights agenda or in its democratic, cosmopolitan ambitions (cfr. Zolo 2002).
Laconically, Girard invites us to let go of this rationalist use of reason as one lets go
of one last mythology, sure that one day we will look back and sigh, ‘we “believed” in
reason, as people believed in the gods’ (Girard 2012: 119).
In their rejection of liberalism’s key assumptions, Girard’s mimetic insights
show a profound assonance with two other contemporary theoretical trajectories in
IR, that of realism and critical theory, albeit with key differences in outlook vis-à-vis
both. Starting from realism, there is no doubt that realism and mimetic theory
converge in foregrounding a number of elements: firstly, the idea that violence, or the
threat thereof, defines the human and political condition; secondly, the notion that
fear and competition are powerful and endemic forces that need restraining so as to
preserve a modicum of order; thirdly, the acknowledgement that any order is the
result of a specific economy of power and violence (Williams 2005, Mearsheimer
2001, Lebow 2003). Mimetic theory, however, digs deeper into this state of affairs
and, by doing so, demonstrates the hollowness of those second order categories
which realism takes as theoretical building blocks. Two cases in points are the
category of ‘human nature’ for classical realism (Morgenthau 1978; cfr. Troy, in this
Issue) and anarchy for structural realism (Waltz 1959, 1979).
In terms of the former, mimetic theory does not fall into trap of reifying human
nature as evil and/or power-obsessed in order to explain conflict. A detailed above
with regards to Hobbes, there is no place, and in fact no need for any such
anthropological assumptions in Girard’s account of how conflict happens. Violence
and war are inherently relational rather than unit-based occurrences, engendered as
they are by the convergence of desires over objects or beings, i.e., acquisitive
mimesis, rather than any innate and subjective proclivity towards conflict.
Interestingly, this may lead one to conclude that in its emphasis on ‘system effects’
(Jervis 1997), strategic interaction and third-image patterns, neorealism may be
18
closer to a mimetic understanding of international politics. With anarchy pointing to a
mere negative condition, i.e., the absence of overarching authoritative mechanisms
to prevent conflict, it is Hobbesian scarcity and competition over finite, scarce goods
– power, territory, security – that function as trigger for war in neorealism. Mimetic
theory, however, strips scarcity of its explanatory power and exposes anarchy as an
empty container when it demonstrates that conflict arises irrespective of the nature of
the object around which desires and interests positively converge – rivalry is what
determines scarcity, not the other way around (on scarcity, see Dumouchel 2014).
Ultimately, this also reveals another aspect over which neorealism and mimetic
theory are bound to diverge – while the former remains materialist and object-
centred in its obsession with capabilities and quantifiers of power, the latter adopts
an inter-subjective, ‘we-centric’ (Anspach 2011: 130), and entirely processual
approach (Dupuy 2011: 209). In this approach, objects of contention not only
dramatically lose importance over the power of rivalry itself, but they also reveal their
ultimately symbolic, rather than substantive, essence (Farneti 2009).
It is precisely in its emphasis of the radically interpersonal nature of the
human and political condition, particularly in the prominent role that the ‘Other’ plays
in mediating our desires (Oughourlian 2007), that mimetic theory shows overlaps
with another set of approaches to IR, those inspired by critical theory (since Cox
1983 and in the sense employed by, e.g., Booth 2007). The relentless suspicion of
Western rationality provides the first commonality. The idea that human and political
desires, identities and interests emerge in an intersubjective nexus, rather than
exclusively by the Cartesian will of rational actors, forms another point of contact.
Finally, there is a clear critical ethos to the concern that mimetic theory has for
scapegoats, victims and outcasts, understood to be embodied emblems of the
violence inscribed in political order, be it domestic or international. On all these
issues there is a clear potential for a fruitful encounter between strands of critical IR
theories and mimetic theory.
Mimetic theory, however, part ways with critical theory when it comes to the
diagnosis of the contemporary condition, as well as its prognosis (McKenna 1992,
2011). Both would point to the erosion of institutions such as sovereignty and war
and the correspondent, limitless expansion of violence as one of the fundamental
traits of our globalised existence. However, they would differ markedly in terms of
whether and how a possible path to resolution can be found. Where critical theory
19
employs the method of relentless critique and deconstruction to navigate the
complexity the late modern condition, mimetic theory becomes decidedly metaphysic
and eschatological when it invokes the possibility of grace and redemption via the
path of imitatio Christi. The narrative that Girard weaves through history is clearly
incompatible with the incredulity towards foundations professed by theorists of a
critical bent. It is all the more intriguing to then observe the cases of those who have
abandoned the former camp and leapt into the revelation of the latter (on Vattimo,
see Antonello 2010 and Depoortere 2008).
By contrasting mimetic theory with contemporary IR theories one can
appreciate the uniqueness of Girard’s approach. Borrowing from the IR vocabulary
and by way of preliminary conclusion, one could summarise the status of a mimetic
approach to IR as follows: a parsimonious, critical yet foundational, anti-rationalist
and intersubjective account to international politics that starts from the study of
violence and ends with an eschatology of salvation.
Beyond the Sacred, Before the Social: Global Politics and Mimesis
Mimetic theory shows unique theoretical characteristics when compared to
contemporary theories of IR. Girard’s insights, however, are also precious in
illuminating three substantive yet often contested issues in IR: the social, sacred and
global aspect of international politics.
Mimetic theory provides an account of the social mechanisms underlying the
human and political condition which is much richer and deeper than that provided by
mainstream IR accounts. Admittedly, for a field often identifying itself as social
science, IR has done remarkably well considering that for a very long time it lacked
ways of conceptualising the social. Progress has been made since the opening up of
the field to sociological approaches (Lawson 2007), including social constructivism
(Onuf 1990, Wendt 1999). With its focus on the intersubjective mechanisms that
generate human and political outcomes, however, mimetic theory provides a view of
the social which is able to channel, contextualise and ultimately go beyond the
insights advanced by social constructivism. There is no doubt that, in Girard’s
account, the most crucial process responsible for the creation and maintenance of
political order, i.e., scapegoating, is a social and intersubjective one. In fact, once
could argue that scapegoating is a classic example of a process of social
construction – an intersubjective, violent meaning-making endeavour. As detailed
20
above, violence in Girard is ‘neither with the object, nor with the subject, but amongst
the subjects’, to paraphrase scholars of the Copenhagen school (Buzan, Waever, de
Wilde 1998: 31), i.e., it cannot be explained by the object over which it is fought, nor
through individual proclivities, but rather through a process of intersubjective, social
construction. Conversely, however, one could argue that the reason why threats can
be socially constructed and processes of securitization are so powerful is that they
conform to, indeed they are instances of, the sacrificial dynamic which for Girard is
responsible for the very making of signifiers and the construction of society in the
first place. ‘Social construction’ therefore becomes a species of which mimesis is the
genus.
Girard’s conceptualisation of the ‘sacred’ is also of unique value, considering
the state contemporary debates between secularism and religion in IR, i.e., between
the so-called ‘resurgence of the sacred’ and the secular Westphalian model (for a
critical review, see Petito and Hatzopoulos, 2003; Review of International Studies,
2012). While certainly advancing our understanding of the relationship between
religion, violence and ‘the international’, these debates have essentially ended up
mirroring the dichotomy between secularism and anti-secularism, or secular and
post-secular (Habermas, 2008). As such, they have ended up reinforcing the
apparent irreconcilability of these two fundamental dimensions of international
politics and have remained imprisoned in yet another conceptual aporia, in what
Scott Appleby has defined the ‘ambiguity of the sacred’ (Appleby 2000). Girard cuts
through this ambiguity and debunks the false dichotomy between the ‘religious’ and
the ‘secular’ by offering an account of human history where sacred violence and
political, ‘secular’ order are intimately linked rather than dichotomous.
Thirdly, mimetic theory also provides a reading of the global condition which
jars with the more benign account of globalisation and offers an alternative narrative
of its contradictions. According to Girard, globalisation marks the highest stage of
political modernity as well as the beginning of its undoing (Cowdell 2013; see also
Cerella, in this Issue). If violence stems from the confluence rather than divergence
of desires, the identity and homogeneity engendered by globalisation introduces a
playing field in which competition, rather than cooperation, becomes the norm. Here
too, mimetic theory reveals the problematic assumptions upon which the liberal
paradigm is built. A case in point is the ‘soft power’ approach (Nye 2004). The idea
that making people ‘want what you want’ is necessarily a prelude to cooperation and
21
peace is valid only if one ignores the conflictual potential of mimesis. Girard’s
insights, therefore, provide a welcome and corrective tonic to the hubristic claims of
hyperglobalists and liberal optimists. In fact, when Girard considers the age of
globalisation as being hysterically mimetic (Girard 2001), this is by no means to
celebrate the triumph of Western liberal democracy over the globe, but to underscore
the limitless potential for violence and conflict which is disclosed in the process.
Mimesis, Political Violence and International Security
The problem of violence, conflict and war may still be considered the central
research question of IR and yet its study has been stunted by a set of unhelpful
conceptual dichotomies and unnatural disciplinary divisions. Scholars of mainstream
IR have notoriously studied war in isolation from the broader problem-field of political
violence (Burgess 2010); scholars of political violence, on the other hand, approach
war only insofar as this fits under the broader umbrella of ‘conflict’ (Kalyvas 2006).
Engaging with Girard’s work is particularly helpful in doing away with these
disciplinary and analytical reifications and regain a sense of both the fluidity and the
centrality of the problem of violence. This is particularly helpful at a time when our
conceptual categories – from war to terrorism – are undergoing a process of erosion,
with boundaries blurring under the effect of the powerful historical social forces of
late modernity.
To start with, as seen above in more detail, Girard identifies in the sacrificial
violence of scapegoating the mechanism central to the construction and the
maintenance of order, a process able to channel the violence of all against all into
the violence of all against one. If one looks at the history of the XX century as well as
contemporary international affairs, the relevance of such mechanism cannot be
overestimated. Scapegoating provides a powerful explanatory key to account for
violence exercised both on a mass scale and on a micro scale: from genocides
recurring across continents and cultures to the lynching of ethnic minority individuals
on the streets of Western democracies (Dumouchel 2009, 2011). When directed
towards foreign ‘enemies’, scapegoating becomes a type of foreign policy that can
sustain governments in crisis through the contagious escalation of displaced
violence – diversionary theories of war (at least since Levy 1989) seem to be clearly
mimetic in essence. Aside from its multifarious applications, scapegoating provides
22
us with a powerful reminder concerning the mobility of violence. This may contrast
quite starkly with the inability of our IR analytical categories to travel, but this
however only underlines the value of a mimetic theory able to embrace all of these
forms.
It is also worth noting how the very principle of imitation or mimesis at the
heart of Girard’s writings remain understudied in international politics. Yet, its
potential applications are virtually infinite, especially at a time when society,
economy and culture exhibit such a high degree of homogenisation through mimesis
– from the proliferation of ‘memes’ (Dawkins, 1976), to the apparent mimicry of
political parties, to the rise of an undifferentiated ‘global culture’. More specifically to
international politics and security, the simple observation that desires, interests and
identity are imitated, rather than spontaneous, resonates with and further illuminates
a variety of patterns: from Cold war and post-Cold war bipolarity read as reciprocity
(Sakwa 2013; Farneti 2013) to strategic interaction ‘tit-for-tat’ game-theoretical
models; from radicalisation understood as imitation to leader-follower relations within
terrorist organisations as mimetic model-subject relations (cfr. Brighi, in this Issue).
Scholars have just started to explore and move beyond these possibilities (Polat
2012), yet much work still lies ahead.
Lastly, mimetic theory offers a convincing reading of both the function of war
as well as its erosion as institution of international society that IR scholars are ill-
advised to ignore. The observation that war, just like a foundational murder, is the
constitutive act of international order might resonate with early intuitions of scholars
belonging to the English school of international relations (Bonanate 1995: 56) but it is
certainly given additional depth and gravitas when read in the context of Girard’s
historical narrative of violence. Girard’s reading of the contemporary practice and
status of war is also worth engaging with from an IR perspective. In terms of the new
practises of war, the use of private military companies is a case in point. As Girard
fittingly reminds us when discussing the figure of the servant in Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar and of Fedka the beggar in Fedor Dostoevsky’s novel Devils, in order for
sacrifice to be effective, societies often need actors able to ‘perform the sacrifice on
the sacrificers’ behalf’ (Girard 1991: 217) thus shifting the blame to some
‘expendable third party’ who will have to carry the stigma of murder (cfr. Baggiarini,
in this issue). As for the status of war, Girard provides an arresting account of the
decline of war, understood as modern institution, and the coming of a permanent
23
state of limitless violence. The value of this account does not simply lie in the fact
that it is in line with the contemporary empirical reality of war. Girard’s reading of
contemporary war is set into, and put in relation with, a sweeping and masterful
narrative of the history our civilisation the kind of which IR has quite possibly never
produced and which now can no longer afford to ignore.
Plan of the Issue
This special issue consists of three core sections. In the first section, mimetic theory
is presented and assessed in the context of the contemporary theoretical trajectories
within IR and, secondly, compared to the arguably still central theoretical approach
of political Realism. The first paper is by Jodok Troy, who interrogates Girard’s
thought through the lens of Hans Morgenthau’s political realism. Troy starts by noting
a number of striking parallels between Morgenthau and Girard, especially in their
treatment of notions such as power and desire. He moves on to argue that the
anthropological insights of Girard can enrich the general thinking about the Self,
Other and identity in the 20th century Realist tradition. Ultimately, Girard’s thought
helps shedding light on a number of implicit claims and assumptions regarding
violence and human nature that remain central to political Realism. In the second
paper of the section, Antonio Cerella compares Carl Schmitt’s and Girard’s
theoretical proposals about the origins, containment and diffusion of violence in order
to explore the end of the Nomos and of its sacrality. This exploration serves to trace
an alternative genealogy of world politics, from its tragic beginnings up to the
dissolution of the political form in the so-called ‘global age’. Against the backdrop of
classical political theory – from Hobbes to Rousseau and Clausewitz – Girard’s and
Schmitt’s radical, and radically different, understandings of the role of violence in the
‘political’ shed light on the problem of political order in the Post-Westphalian age.
In the second section of the issue, Girard’s mimetic theory will be used to
rethink the thorny relationship between religion and violence in international
relations, to explore the conundrum of the ambiguity of the sacred, and to propose a
different ‘image’ of the nature of political conflict at the international level, as well as
of the means for its resolution. Scott Thomas’ contribution takes issue with the
current state of affairs and sets out a challenging alternative approach to the study of
war in international relations as well as the relationship between religion and
violence. Thomas contends that the problem of ‘religious violence’ has been
24
invented or constructed as one of the main issues in the ‘religious turn’ in IR, or the
global resurgence of religion. His paper seeks to link mimetic theory with specific
approaches to international theory – it points towards critical theory, post-positivism,
and continental approaches to social constructivism in IR – in order to overcome the
use of substantive definitions of religion in political science and international relations
and move towards a functional and a more expansive understanding of it. While
Rosemary Durward agrees with Scott Thomas’ deconstruction of the notion of
religious violence, she also focuses on the potentiality of emancipation inherent in
mimetic theory. In particular, taking a cue from Girard’s latest ‘apocalyptic’ phase,
where he asserts that ‘politics cannot save us’, she suggests a new reading of
Girard’s latest writings as an injunction to expand our definition of global politics and
its possibilities, starting from a revision of just war theory and an exploration of an
‘ontology of charity’. Lastly, according to Harald Wydra, we should rethink and re-
frame the so-called ‘religious resurgence’ in global politics. The binding power of the
sacred, according to Wydra, occurs in liminal borderline experiences of crisis, revolt,
or terror – when regularities, hierarchies, conventional limits of ‘normal’ politics, and
markers of certainty break down. Forms of collective self-transcendence emerge in
unexpected and inexplicable moments of authority vacuum and re-aggregation
brought about by the process of global mobilization. The sacrificial crisis which
Girard points out as defining the contemporary condition thus intersects with the
proliferation of victimhood in which, however, sacrifice no longer saves and
manifests itself in trends such as the contemporary quest for certainty and the
appeal to a sacred future.
The third and final section of the Special Issue will offer insights from mimetic
theory into some of the most crucial and debated contemporary political issues: from
the military privatization of violence in USA to the biopolitics of security, from the
emergence of new forms of political violence and terrorism to the persistence of
sacrifice. The section begins with a contribution by Margaret Denike who invites us
to reconsider René Girard’s general account of sacrificial violence in order to
elucidate the race-thinking that structures contemporary discourses on security in
Western security states, particularly in Canada and the USA. In doing so, she
explains how sacrificial violence is a productive tool for critically elucidating the
affective politics of security discourses, including those that organize and inform the
biopolitical formations of race distinctions. From a different perspective, Bianca
25
Baggiarini focuses on the growing military privatization to launch a challenge to
Girard’s mimetic theory. Using Foucault’s conceptual tools, she explores how military
privatization permits states to (silently and precariously) call for a sort of ‘end of
sacrifice’. This concealment of violence is then linked to the genealogical trajectories
of the citizen-soldier to argue that military privatization, as exemplified by the
burgeoning industry of private military and security companies (PMSCs) and the
current American administration’s use of drone warfare, allows for the removal of
sacrifice as a feature of the post-WWII social contract between states and citizens.
Finally, the extent to which violence and sacrality shape contemporary terrorism is
explored by Elisabetta Brighi. Using the examples of Anders Breivik’s massacre in
Oslo, the ‘marathon bombers’ in Boston and the Woolwich attack in London, she
focuses on the new phenomenon of lone-wolf terrorism and contends that notions of
‘imitation’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘desire’ are central categories to conceptualize this form of
terrorism and simultaneously reclaim it as a form of political, rather mindless,
violence.
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Figure 1. Girard’s Mimetic Model
MODEL
Figure 2. Inter-subjective dynamics: the dynamics converges towards an attractor that is generated by itself. The evolution is said to be reflexive, self-enforcing and path-dependent.
EMERGENCE
SUBJECT OBJECTDesire, T²
Desire, T¹Conflic
t, T³
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CONVERGENCE
Source: Dupuy (2011)
(A) DYNAMICS
(B) ATTRACTOR